Overdrive

Three days after his clash with Dio, Speedwagon slips up to Jonathan's hospital room and glimpses a young woman tending his burns, her hands raw from the effort. Jonathan wakes to recognize her as Erina Pendleton, his childhood love, and Speedwagon quietly withdraws. In London, Dio, wheeled about by a zombified Wang Chan and hidden beneath a cloak, seizes Jack the Ripper mid-murder and drains him into undeath. The following day, a stranger perched on a wall lunges at Jonathan, driving a finger into his lung yet mending his fractured arm. He is Will Anthonio Zeppeli, a martial artist of the Ripple. He demonstrates the technique on a frog, channeling the shock through the animal to shatter the rock beneath it, then reveals that the mask and Dio both survive.

Zeppeli trains Jonathan across the following week and recounts his own past: as a boy he joined his scholarly father's excavation team and helped unearth the Stone Mask in Mexican ruins, only to watch a masked killer slaughter the crew on the voyage home. He survived because the rising sun destroyed the wearer, whom he realized too late was his own father. After teaching the Zoom Punch, Zeppeli learns from Speedwagon that Dio has surfaced in Windknight's Lot, and the group rides out. Ambushed in a mountain tunnel by Jack the Ripper, Zeppeli deflects the assassin's scalpels with Ripple-charged wine and melts half his face with a kick. Handed a full glass and told not to spill a drop, Jonathan corners Jack, channels a Sendo Ripple Overdrive through a wall, and blasts the killer apart.

The adaptation opens with Speedwagon's second hospital visit and omits his earlier turn-away, reworks Dio subduing Jack from repeated stabbings into instant mind control, and cuts the flashback detailing how Dio escaped his ruined mansion. The fight between Jonathan and Wang Chan is dropped, along with several smaller exchanges, and Zeppeli's first-appearance outfit is swapped for his usual attire. Director Naokatsu Tsuda recalled adding an unscripted beat of Jonathan hoisting a rock to show the audience just how impressive the Ripple could be.